Newsletter Signup!
- What's On Your Mind?
I want to gather information to help me improve my services, write articles that are meeting your needs & help me know what is important to you at this stage in your life. Please take the survey at Survey Monkey!
Get Ellen's book on her Products page or see it now on Amazon!
Book a Session
Book your FREE 30 minute coaching
session today:
You have a choice of:
MidLife Caregiving
Manage Your MidLife Stress
MidLife Empowerment
You will receive Ellen's Midlife Balance Course with your free coaching session
Contact Ellen at:
1-800-961-1364 (Toll Free North America)
1-604-886-1916 (Gibson's BC)
ellen@ellenbesso.com
Archive for July, 2009
I have a friend; a woman who’s been part of my small town network for almost 20 years. She received word recently that her cancer has recurred. Her medical caregivers, who are very supportive from what she tells me, say they can ‘manage’ her illness so she may have a few more years to live. In the meantime her daughter is struggling with a very aggressive form of the same cancer. Her hope is to support her daughter as best she can while receiving her own treatment and caring for herself.
When a friend or their family member is terminally ill how can we be with them in a way that supports them while not draining us? How do we act? What should we say? Some will back away from them, treating them like pariahs, while others will fall all over themselves trying to do too much. Both of these approaches send the message to the person that they are no longer one of us – they are ’sick people’, ‘patients’, ‘victims of a disease’, ‘perhaps dying’.
- How can we be take a middle ground and stay the course with them as long as they need us?
Most of us will have our own grieving to do – for our friend and for the parts of our own past that are incomplete. If we take the time, give ourselves permission and have the courage, we may then be able to be present for our friend in the best ways possible. We may continue our friendship, and may go on a loving, transformative journey with them.
This is very hard stuff, make no mistake about it. It’s not always possible for us to do this. It may be too much for us at this time. We ourselves may have already experienced too many losses of those dear to us. And that’s okay – okay to make the choice that feels right for us at this time in our life.
- Others will be available to help if we cannot be there; we needn’t feel that we must do it all.
My mother told me when I was young to always save my good clothes for special occasions. In fact, when I was little she saved my fancy dresses for so long I often outgrew them! For years I did the same thing; I only wore ‘decent’ clothes when I was going somewhere important.
Lately I’ve been wearing all my clothes whenever I feel like it. Even my lovely Indian shalwar kameezes and silk sari wrap-around skirts. I just put some tights under them when I’m cold, which is fairly often here in my west coast oceanside community. Sure I still wear the shlumpadinka outfits sometimes, but I’m having fun dressing myself up.
I had a thought today while I was hanging my bright orange shirt on the clothesline:
- What if we save the best parts of our lives for later the way we save our best clothes?
Many of us put off our dreams for another day. We wait for the traveling, for the career we’ve always aspired to, the time with our kids, that move to the country…Perhaps we’re working ourselves up the ladder at our jobs, maybe we wan that larger home, the newest stuff.
But what if later never comes? What if, for whatever reasons we are not able to fulfill our dreams because we run out of time?
- Don’t wait until later – start today to challenge the limiting stories you tell yourself! The ones that stop you from making the changes.
I invite you to live your life fully today.
I’m okay, maybe you’re not – projecting our stuff
I guess that’s why we don’t live in isolation, rather we live surrounded by others in varying degrees of community. What Kirstie Alley was doing and saying seemed quite odd and imbalanced to me, but then don’t I do all kinds of things that don’t make sense, and that cause my life to go out of balance? Don’t we all?
Kirstie lived healthily for a period of time, a couple of years or so, and as spokesperson for Jennie Craig lost much weight and was a model for many American women. Then about a year ago, maybe she got tired of doing it all ‘right’, I don’t know; she decided to turn her dining room, full of gym equipment, back to its original purpose so she could wine and dine her friends. She had all the equipment moved out of the dining room and shoved into a smaller room, and never looked back on working out. Needless to say, she gained a load of weight.
This show begs the big questions, “Why can’t Kirstie Alley afford a workout room in her lovely home?”, “Why would she turn her beautiful dining room into a workout room?” And a final one: “Why is she designing a weight loss program when she had already found a balanced program that seemed to work well for her?”.
Most of us have to be hit over the head before we get things. (I know someone who was literally hit hard on the head several times when she inadvertently struck a 2×4 jutting out from an unfinished doghouse. Each time she felt enraged with her husband who was in charge of the project; finally the last time she got it that he wasn’t the one causing her to bend down and hit her head. But that topic’s a whole other story and we’ll leave it for another time !)
Maybe Kirstie’s out there as a figurative ‘hit on the head’ for us…a gift from the Universe! Thank you Kirstie Alley!